Paper books

To the generation of 1930, Frank Harris is already a legend. At seventy-five he sits on his balcony by the still Mediterranean waters and remembers his youth. To us, to whom he reveals with the assurance of an eyewitness to many of last century's men of light and leading, his youth appears all business and discourse with personages whose stories are now a part of history - personages like Emerson and Whitman and Carlyle and Ruskin and Whistler, like King Edward and Debs and Bismarck. Others of the Harris gallery are still with us. They were young when he was young, and of one fellowship with him in labor and aspiration. Among these, he names three, Galsworthy and Wells and Shaw, who are still the giants of the world of letters, each in the winter of his life eager about the human future to the end of time. But Harris remembers his youth, and it seems to him golden. Maybe it is because he had a youth as these men had not, a youth wherein the reality was as the boy's dream, and the dream as the reality.

"William Plomer's first novel, which first appeared in 1926, ignited a firestorm of controversy in his native South Africa. At the novel's center is Turbott Wolfe, a British trader who opens a general store in Lembuland. He befriends many of his black customers but has less luck ingratiating himself with the bigoted whites who have lived in the area for generations. Eventually, Wolfe and his comrades embrace miscegenation as the key to Africa's future - the Young Africa, where the races have blurred. Provocative and deeply questioning, Turbott Wolfe remains a powerful chronicle of the intimate human consequences of racism."--Jacket.